Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II. (Quality Paperback Book Club selection $50,000 ad/promo) A familiar old tale told by an author who doesn't make it new, but much of the time makes it lovely, vivid, and touching. There, the years will pass eremite Aimee's only two friends, each also crippled in one way or another, will become her symbolic husband and child and the novel-trudging increasingly as it nears its close-will mete out the healing years. The author, luckily, paints this melodrama on a cloth made sturdily from the actual detail and texture of real 19th-century life, both at the mills and down on the farm-where Aimee, as scandalous to the town as a Hester Prynn (albeit without her Pearl), nurses her grief in a 12-by-12-foot bogside cabin on the edge of her parents' land. Jeremiah's death soon after brings an inconsolable sense of loss to Aimee that's more than compounded when she delivers twins who are whisked off at once to waiting foster parents, never to be seen again. By the time Aimee, at 15, implores her parents to let her go off to the mills, she's already come close to bursting with her new sexuality, has lusted after an itinerant mill-agent, and, in the hayloft, has had an innocent enough-to modern eyes and ears-sexual experience with her tubercular brother Jeremiah that like a memory of sin will stay with her (not altogether convincingly) all her life.

And with the name came early beauty, a quick mind, very stubborn disposition, and extraordinarily passionate temperament.

When her first child was born in 1829, Aimee's mother picked the baby's name from a magazine called The Ladies' Pearl. A Drue Heinz winner for her stories (Have You Seen Me?, 1991), Graver offers a debut novel about a 19th-century New Hampshire farm girl who goes off to the fabric mills of Lowell, Mass., finds herself pregnant and abandoned † la Tess Durbeyfield, then returns home to live a life of remorse and penance ever after.

Unravelling by Elizabeth Graver